Month: February 2006

Okay, I know how much you all loved my post about having my first /. post modded up to +5, so I thought I’d let you know my first article submission got accepted too! As it currently looks:

Microsoft Hopes Prizes Will Attract New Searchers

Posted by CowboyNeal in The Mysterious Future!from the scratch-and-win dept.

BertieBaggio writes “Remember the long-running e-mail hoax that had Bill Gates testing an “e-mail tracing program” and offering to pay recipients big bucks if they passed his test e-mail along to all their friends? Well, the offer is true, sort of. Microsoft wants you to use its search engine, and it’s got $1 million worth of prizes up for grabs for those who nibble at the offer. Following Yahoo’s recent consideration of offering prizes to searchers, is this another tactic to lure users away from Google with candy and other shiny things?”

Well well. EA decided to release patch 1.2 to the world yesterday, February 14th. I played a few rounds on a couple servers to see how the patch had affected things. My thoughts: some things have changed, but not all for the better… Continue reading “BF2 Patch 1.20: Initial Reactions”

Â Thats right, valve have finally delivered on thier promise to make new episodic content!

Valve Software has revealed to GameSpot that Aftermath, the upcoming expansion pack to the award-winning 2004 shooter Half-Life 2, has been renamed “Half-Life 2: Episode One.” When asked whether the name change is indicative of a change in direction for the Half-Life 2 franchise, Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi replied, “episodic.” When asked the follow-up question of whether the new name meant that beginning of a regular flow of content, Lombardi replied, “yes.”

This is all well and good, as long as they are a reasonable price…and come fairly regularly and on time. Only time will tell if this is good or not.

Just a small announcement (that probably didn’t need an exclamation mark) to the effect that this blog has been moved from http://bertieb.dyndns.org:50000/bertieb/ — which was pretty ugly — to http://blog.roberthallam.org; which is nicer looking, more descriptive, and let me experiment to figure out how the directive works in Apache.

And here is your word of the week: Gegenbeispiel(German for counterexample)

Friends on steam used to work…sort of. It would let you find your friends and then join whatever server they were on…sort of. It was plagued by problems, mostly reliability issues, one day it worked and the next day it didn’t. Now Valve have released the first update to it for a long time, and it will hopefully be the start of better things to come for it. Head over to HERE for info on how to use it, and feel free to add me! (username ksyme99)